Page 37 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Consumer Experience and Protection

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Consumer Experience and Protection

4.7 Legal entities

If the provider of the DFS implementation and the operator of the physical network are the same legal entity
it should be unproblematic for the telecom regulator to impose certain QoS requirements with respect to the
DFS “service” offered by such entity.

However, if the provider of the DFS “service” and the physical network operator are distinct and separate
legal entities, it might turn out problematic to impose any QoS requirements with regard to the DFS onto the
network operator.

Therefore, it is suggested to predominantly only accept DFS “services” offered by the physical network operator.

NOTE: However, the question may be raised whether this is realistic. Up to now, network operators were not
even able to successfully establish higher-value services in the entertainment sector (such mobile music or
video). On the other hand de-coupling a DFS "service" from the physical network makes it strictly speaking to
an OTT "service" provided under best effort conditions, which by their nature withstand technical regulation.

5 Future Considerations: Top-level view

This section deals with an end-to-end model of DFS. It focuses on the essence for user-related functionality
of DFS by providing a top-level view of (selected) DFS use cases.

The term “transaction” is used to describe a single instance of a complete use case from a customer point
of view, in accordance to the usage of this term in other fields of QoS standardization . It is noted that in this
1
case the term is also part of the common expression “financial transaction”.

The use cases described serve as examples to explain the underlying framework. The underlying model can,
however, be easily applied to other use cases which are identified to be relevant in the DFS context.

From the use cases, quality metrics are derived. The key point of the model is that it is, on its topmost
level, “technology agnostic”. The actual implementation may be in manifold ways, with specific technical
characteristics, strengths and weaknesses; these come in in lower levels of the model. The technology agnostic
top level makes sure that no “technology-related” allowances are made (such as “discounts” for known technical
weaknesses of particular implementations). Also, the model makes sure that new technical developments in
realizing DFS do not disrupt existing QoS metrics.

The underlying general principle of the QoS metrics proposed is also to provide the smallest possible number
of KPI, with each KPI having a clearly defined relation to user perception. This shall avoid the situation – which
can be observed in some KPI sets – that single KPI overlap from their meaning, which can lead to unclear or
even contradictory results.
An actual DFS implementation will be using different network- related “services” or functionality. The respective
section shows how the use case related top-level view – and its KPI – can be mapped to this technological level
of currently existing “carrier services” with respective (mostly already existing) KPI.

The principle of having a small number of strong KPI does not exclude additional KPI with diagnostic or
administrative function.

It is recognized that there are several stakeholders with different interests. The respective section – which is
also to be seen as an expandable illustration of the underlying concept – describes this view in more detail.

1 For instance, a transaction for the service „Telephony“ would be a call from an A party to a B party, from call setup to a call usage
phase to the call hang-up by the A party.

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